this reason, some gaming PCs use certain RAID setups to lower latency and increase throughput to mass storage. Since the space taken up by games is nominal compared to the total availability on modern hard drives, speed is preferred over capacity. Solid-state drives have become popular in recent times, which offer significantly higher speeds than mechanical hard drives. Originally more expensive than hard disk drives, over time, prices have significantly dropped. The performance of SSDs is now considered a minimum, and some consider them necessary even in budget PCs. Currently, NVMe drives have become the standard for fast storage. These drives connect straight into the motherboard, allowing for extremely fast data read and write speed. These drives are very fast and most NVMe PCIe drives easily surpass the speed of SATA and M.2 SSDs. Audio While sound hardware is usually integrated onto modern gaming motherboards, gaming PCs can also be equipped with a dedicated sound card and speakers in a 5.1 or 7.1 surround sound configuration. A speaker setup or a set of quality headphones is required to enjoy the advanced sound found in most modern computer games. Sound cards have hardware accelerated technologies, such as EAX. The Sound Blaster X-Fi, with its Fatal1ty editions having 64 MB of onboard RAM (unmatched for a sound card), targets enthusiasts as its main demographic, having a dedicated "gaming mode". Dedicated sound cards have largely died out in popularity, however, due to many modern motherboards now supporting onboard audio, which is considered perfectly acceptable for most use cases. The decline of sound cards started with the introduction of the new millennium. From 2000-2007 the market for these cards collapsed 80%, greater than the 2007-2008 financial decline that had happened in the latter part of the decade. Peripherals Display A fast response time and high refresh rate is desired in order to display smooth motion. A framerate of 60 frames per second (FPS) is generally the minimum acceptable framerate in a video game for enthusiasts, with some enthusiasts preferring 144 FPS or in some cases 165 FPS, to match the refresh rate of their monitor (144 Hz or 165 Hz, respectively). Some gaming monitors can be overclocked to achieve higher refresh rates. Gaming with multiple monitors is possible, but this is not a feature supported by all games. Many players game using three monitors, which increases the load on the graphics card threefold. Some